‘This Old Man: All in Pieces,’ by Roger Angell

By Steven Winn

Published
5:12 pm PST, Friday, December 11, 2015

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‘This Old Man: All in Pieces,’ by Roger Angell

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No one in the magazine’s storied history carries more New Yorker DNA than Roger Angell. The son of longtime editor Katharine S. White and stepson of famed contributor and author E.B. White, Angell began writing for the New Yorker in 1944 and continues doing so to this day, at age 95, with print pieces and blog posts. During his many years as a fiction editor — he ruefully notes having rejected more than 15,000 stories, while shepherding everyone from Donald Barthelme to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to Alice Munro into print — Angell reinvented himself mid-career as a peerless baseball reporter and rhapsodist, composed numerous iterations of the annual year-end “Greetings, Friends!” holiday poem and in 2006 gathered his essays into a quietly ravishing memoir, “Let Me Finish.”

There’s much more to the ongoing Angell archives. A new collection, “This Old Man,” offers bright and ingratiating testimony, with full-length magazine pieces and haikus, personal reminiscence and posthumous tributes, baseball posts and e-mails.

The result, as the author cheerfully acknowledges, is a “dog’s breakfast,” with “a bit of everything” tossed into the bowl. Those less devoted than this reviewer to (a) New Yorker lore and (b) baseball may sniff at some of the morsels or find a higher portion of filler. But the best things are so indisputably fine that patience is richly and repeatedly rewarded.

The earliest original publication date is 1995 — an astute and affectionate Onward and Upward with the Arts piece about the New Yorker cartoonist and children’s book author William Steig. The newest pieces bear a 2015 stamp. Photographs and cartoons scattered through the pages serve as an apt visual analogue of the New Yorker itself.

It’s irresistible, given the range and variety of the selections, to cherry-pick quotes and let the writing speak shiningly for itself. Angell is neither an aphoristic nor overtly flashy writer. His virtues are those of close observation and considered reflection, careful accretion of detail and argument, and a prose style whose ambling grace belies its lean economy. Read in collected form, his work self-certifies the praise he offers here to both the original New Yorker editor Harold Ross and the late drama critic and books editor Edith Oliver. They both, he notes, always sounded like themselves.

Here’s Angell, sounding like himself, after observing a stranger weeping on the street: “For grown-ups, tears, when they do arrive, come from a considerable distance but startle us with their familiarity.” In the midst of a lovely V.S. Pritchett tribute, Angell observes that his subject “had freed himself of the occupational self-pity that makes so many writers so much less fun to meet than one expects.”

Brooding Giants slugger Barry Bonds earns the passing Harry Potter-inspired sobriquet “the Lord Voldemort of baseball,” while an elder John Updike is captured in this single, ready-for-framing sentence: “Informally august, he stayed young after his hair turned white, but the additions of fame and a vast work now made him seem Colonial, ready for the portrait on a postage stamp.”

The title piece of “This Old Man” first appeared in 2014 and brought a prestigious prize, a flood of mail and “more kindness than anything else I’ve written.” New and returning readers of it will have no trouble seeing why. Opening with a bouncily clinical catalog of a nonagenarian’s physical woes, the piece moves with a kind of intuitive yet inevitable logic to lost friends, a longing lament for “the collapsing, grossly insistent world” and an affirmation of “our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love.”

It’s all very tender, but tough-minded as well. Angell records his own growing “invisibility” in social settings and drolly celebrates “the light boredom of well-worn friends.” A beloved dog’s demise carries an unexpected depth charge. Just try to read it without an onset of those distantly sourced but familiar tears.

Just as good, on its very different terms, is a tribute to Nabokov’s novel “Lolita,” published on the occasion of a new, now forgotten 1997 film adaptation starring Jeremy Irons. Angell, by temperament an appreciator, gives Nabokov’s “horrific comic masterpiece” the kind of insightful, empathic, tonally nuanced reading that’s beyond most full-time book critics. Angell may lack their critical detachment and instinct for passing judgment — there’s barely a harsh word about anyone in “This Old Man” save for Brendan Gill, whose “Here at the New Yorker” memoir is deemed mean-spirited. But the “Lolita” essay matters more than a bushel of critics’ raves and pans. Steadily, decisively, movingly, it demonstrates once and for all what a mordant, glorious love story this still-vilified book truly is.

Recollections of now departed figures form the most pronounced leitmotif in “This Old Man.” Keep writing as long as Angell has, and the list of friends, family members, colleagues and ball players to send off with tributes keeps growing. The elegant New Yorker editor Gardner Bostford, combative Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver and Elwood Carter, the caretaker of Angell’s summer house in Maine, are among those vividly remembered here.

In 1998, Angell eulogized the New Yorker editor and fiction writer William Maxwell. “We want our stories to come out differently, but they never do,” said Angell. The consolation he found in Maxwell’s work and friendship are the very things Angell captures in his own “lives relived — with the same questions asked, and with answers or amends still elusive — but now illuminated with the courage and persistence of a great companion.”